If thou wert pure and upright, surely now he would awake for thee. Job viii. 6.

SO Bildad spoke, suggesting that Job was not pure and upright, since God did not appear to deliver him. The premises from
which he argued were that God always delivers and prospers pure and upright men, and that therefore, if a man were not delivered
and prospered, he was proved to be neither pure nor upright. The fallacy lay in the premiss. It is not universally true that
God delivers his saints from adverse circumstances, or prospers them with outward good. There have
been in all ages thousands of devoted servants of God who have been destitute, afflicted, and tormented; and there are thousands
of such to-day in prisons, in hospital wards, in every condition of privation and trial; but in none of these cases can there
be the least imputation on the love and righteousness of God, nor necessarily on their fidelity and goodness.

God's arrangements for us are not governed by the superficial philosophy which would make material prosperity a sign of his
favour, and adversity of his displeasure. There are many considerations beside. Our privations in the outward strengthen and
ripen the inward. As the outward man decays, the inward is renewed day by day. We have to learn and manifest those passive
virtues which can only mature in silence and sorrow. We must be taught to be largely independent of
circumstances, and to find in God Himself the springs of unfailing supply. We must learn to carry the sentence of death in
ourselves, that we may not trust in ourselves, but in the living God. We have to stiffer with and for others. All these things
worketh God with us to make us partakers of his holiness. But amid all our sorrows, He is always awake for us.